A Subject I Almost MISSed, Part 3

What's happening: In this 5-part series I'm telling about the different space books I've been reading this school year. ~Photobug

My next space adventure was entitled Into that Silent Sea, and this book chronicled the early Soviet and American space flights. It was written by Colin Burgess and Francis French. As usual, it was an awesome book. (and 383 pages.) I had originally learned of it in California, and so when we got home I read it. :) Into that Silent Sea was really cool in the way that it jumped back and forth from the Soviets to the Americans. First I learned about Yuri Gagarin and his flight, then about Alan Shepard. After learning about the astronauts’ nurse, Dee O’Hara, the book went back to Russia and Cosmonaut Gherman Titov, the second man to orbit the earth. The book continued talking about more Russian firsts, such as the first 3-person crew (Voskhod 1) and first spacewalk. (Completed by Alexei Leonov, see above for description of his flight.) In addition to this, Into that Silent Sea told about the flight of Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space. Of course Into that Silent Sea also describes the Mercury flights, of Gus Grissom, John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, Wally Schirra, and Gordo Cooper. (I don’t think I missed any astronauts/flights there…)

When I started reading space books back in January I was just focusing on Apollo. But with reading Into that Silent Sea, I found that Project Mercury—and Gemini too, I’m sure—are just as exciting. I thought it interesting that in the early stages, Project Mercury was referred to MISS, Man-In-Space-Soonest. However, NASA was wise and reveled America’s first space program as Project Mercury. I think the press would have had a heyday with the name MISS…especially if a test or flight went wrong! MISS is actually where I got the name of this article from, because I almost MISSed reading about Mercury! ;D I searched our libraries and found autobiographies, or biographies on all of the original Mercury 7 astronauts…libraries, here I come! :D

So that’s what I did next. I read the book by the astronauts themselves, entitled We Seven. Each of the Mercury astronauts—Scott Carpenter, Gordo Cooper, Gus Grissom, John Glenn, Wally Schirra, Deke Slayton, and Alan Shepard---wrote in We Seven, which was 368 pages. They shared stories, from how they were selected as astronauts, to their inhuman preparation, how the Mercury capsule was built, and even training for flights and the flights themselves.

NASA introduced the new astronauts on April 9, 1959. I remember reading that one of the hardest things for America’s newest heroes was the press conference. They could handle a supersonic jet like nobody else, and they would fly America into space, but speaking to a bunch of 200 news-thirsty reporters made them sick. I also remember that one reporter asked the astronauts what the medical tests were like. I’m paraphrasing again, but John Glenn replied: “Think how far down any orifice a medic will go, and you are starting to get an idea…” Everyone roared with laughter…and that ended the press conference!

Learning about the astronaut’s training was very eye-opening. I do not think I would ever want to be an astronaut! Since nobody had been into space yet, everyone over-trained. The SimSup (Simulation Supervisor) would make the simulations much harder than what was expected in outer space. For example, if it was expected that an astronaut would experience 10 Gs in space or re-entry, there would be simulations for 20. Stuff like that. Each astronaut would tell something different about the program. For example, each astronaut oversaw a different area. One astronaut may be overseeing the Atlas rocket building, while another may be looking at how the instruments are arranged in the cockpit. Can you believe that there were seven miles of wiring in the Mercury capsule?? And Mercury was “basic”. Just think how complicated Gemini and Apollo were!! Since We Seven was written in 1962, before the Mercury program was over, the book does not talk about all the Mercury flights. Just the first four flights of Shepard, Grissom, Glenn, and Carpenter.

I said earlier that part of being an astronaut was overseeing a different part of the capsule, rocket, etc. When the Apollo program was being developed, Gus Grissom was overseeing part of the Apollo capsule being crafted at North American in southern California. North American officials kindly asked Grissom to give a pep speech to the disheartened workers. Now you must understand that Gus Grissom was not a person for many words. While he did oblige to the officials, he gave an interesting but funny speech: “Do good work!” Funny and short as it may seem, this “speech” motivated the workers like nothing else had. Workers created signs that said “Do good work!” and that simple phrase helped the workers quite a bit!

OK. Back to Mercury! I really enjoyed learning about the preparation for, and the actual mission of John Glenn. If you do not remember, he was the first American in space to orbit. I had not known before that there was a support crew for each mission. See, there was the prime crew (or in Mercury, a crew meant one astronaut), the backup crew, and the support crew. The prime crew was scheduled to actually fly the mission. The backup crew would train just as hard as the prime crew, so that if something happened to the prime crew the mission would still go forward and the backup crew could fly. With John Glenn’s flight NASA introduced the notion of a support crew. The support crew’s job was to take care of matters that the prime or backup crews may have overlooked. 

For Glenn’s flight the backup crew was Scott Carpenter, and the support crew was Alan Shepard. After reading about the very interesting preparation, and delays, of Glenn’s flight, his rocket finally lit and carried him into orbit. I read in We Seven that getting into orbit was very complicated. It was like shooting a bullet into a very small hole miles away and the wood not splintering. Something like that.

John Glenn had to endure the same embarrassment that Alan Shepard had to go through. Namely—letting an inferior species, a chimp, go into space before Glenn did. This time, Enos was the lucky chimp and rode a rocket to the skies. Ham had been considered for this flight, however, a few days before Ham had gotten into the proverbial “cookie jar” and eaten too many banana pellets. This made him overweight for the flight. While not as nice a chimp as Ham, Enos was smart and tried to do his job. Unfortunately, there was an electrical short somewhere in the capsule and Enos was not getting his reward of banana pellets, even when he flipped the right switch!! Constantly he would get a slight electrical jolt on his foot. Enos was one aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaangery chimp when he got out of his capsule!!

I remember some particularly funny stories from We Seven. (Don’t worry—this won’t be another 2 pages on We Seven!) Bill Douglas was the doctor for the Mercury astronauts, and Douglas had a tank of fish on his desk. Well, to make sure that the air that was going to be going into Glenn’s suit was OK, Douglas decided to run the air into his fish tank. If anything was bad with the air, or some other fatal chemical had gotten mixed in, Douglas would know because his fish would be dead. When Glenn was being suited up to go and fly his mission, Glenn causally asked Douglas, “Hey, did you see your fish belly-up in the tank?” Dr. Douglas ran on over to his tank, and saw all his fish happily swimming around—none dead. Then he realized that Glenn was teasing! That is one thing I picked up a lot about the Mercury astronauts—they liked to tease a lot!

Even with all the training and preparation, Glenn’s flight was not without apprehension or worry. For example, telemetry, or data from the capsule, had been telling Mercury Control that the heat shield had come loose. At the same time, Mercury Control was wondering if the telemetry was false or not. Do they believe it? So the whole flight controlling team was trying to decide what to do. They certainly didn’t want the first American in orbit to die!

To be continued...